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I’ll lose my eyesight some day, so I have to appreciate it now

Film-maker and critic Mark Cousins was inspired to write The Story of Looking by a DNA test

Stephen McGinty

December 3 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

Heart on his sleeve: CousinsGETTY IMAGES

Mark Cousins is making coffee in the white kitchen of the white flat, just off Newington Road in Edinburgh, where he has lived for the past 20 years. He’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, revealing thin arms with tattoos that remind me of Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.

This makes little sense. De Niro’s psychopathic rapist Max Cady was buff from years of prison dips, and few would mistake Cousins’s wiry frame for that of a pumped-up movie star. No, but the tattoos express an enthusiastic amateurism like that of Cady’s prison ink, which declared his intent: “Vengeance is mine” from Romans and, from Matthew, “My time is at hand”.

Mark Cousins’s tattoos, I learn, are just as impassioned tributes: “Forough”, for the…

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